The Red Cactus Desert-Geena and the '59 Dodge Lancer

By Patsy Stanley

"The Red Cactus Desert-Geena and the '59 Dodge Lancer" is Book # 2 in the ongoing Desert Store Series. Geena, a 12 year old girl, escapes from her corrupted father and settles in a desert store in New Mexico with her mother. With the inherited Sight from her mother, Geena finds solace in the store and its

• Language: English
• Publisher: Patsy Stanley
• Release date: Oct 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9798987202791

Patsy Stanley

Patsy Stanley is an artist, illustrator and author. She has authored both nonfiction and fiction books including novels, children's books, energy books, art books, and more. She can reached at:[e-mail] for questions and comments.

Book preview

hapter One

Hey baby, where dat’ fancy red dress

I laks’ fer’ ya’ ta’ wear?

don’t say dat’, baby,

Cardinuls’ is jist’ pretty red birds, baby,

nothin’ significant of sin,

I admire yo’ long red nails, baby,

‘cause the blues ain’t the only place we been.

Cowboy Johnson finally told us about the red cactus at the campfire after he and I dealt with the woman in red. I watched him pick up his drawing stick and start drawing cactus shapes in the sand around the fire. I knew he was only sharing his secret with us because of the dangerous woman that stopped at the store for gas. I bet he would have kept the red cactus his personal secret forever if she hadn’t stopped; like a whole bunch of other secrets I suspected he kept stashed away.

The woman dressed in red showed up at noon. Everyone was off doing something else, except for Cowboy Johnson and me. She coasted her dusty fire engine red 1953 Austin Healy 100 to a stop in front of the gas pumps and crawled out, clutching a stubby black pistol in her hand. It looked like dull rubber. Not a pistol to admire. Utility. Probably didn’t make much of a sound when it was fired. I was standing on the front porch, busy impaling a dead bug with a long pin, readying it for a specimen box. I stopped what I was doing to admire the little red sports car. Then I spotted the ugly gun in her hand.

Puzzled, I looked from the gun to the woman. At first I thought they were tattoos on her face. She wore low slung, tight red, shiny pants with a low-cut red top showing almost all of her breasts and skyscraper red high heels. She was very blond. The kind of color that comes in those bottles in the back of the drugstore.

I watched Cowboy Johnson step out of the garage. He kept wiping his hands on a grease rag as he moseyed toward the gas pumps real slow, taking his time, like he didn’t have a care in the world. His steps slowed to a stop about ten feet away from her.

My skeletal joints groaned with tightness and tension as I realized the woman was black and blue, not tattooed. Beat up. Fresh. Eyes full of blood and yellow pain. I wanted to shout her pain because I could feel it. Like Mama, I’m a psychic, too. And yes, for me, pain comes in colors, sometimes too many colors at once, depending on its depth and how quick it comes on. And yellow pain, like hers, is always bad. One of the worst because it is bone deep, attaching itself to the traumas of the persons genetic ancients.

See, everybody around here thinks I’m too immature to understand a damn thing. Their ridiculous point of view wears my patience and my mostly positive attitude pretty thin at times. I guess they expect me to be immature forever, like Mama. Maybe they think Sight is an immature thing to have, but they’re wrong. Having the Sight is a troubling gift, a double whammy of a gift. Sometimes it saved, healed, whatever, and you suddenly became a wise woman, a heroine. Most of the time, you ended up looking like an ineffective ass.

I studied the woman’s aura. It was full of fire, flaming outward far more than the usual foot it did when people got upset. Her inner child played with matches. A lot. The thickness of her aura told me this woman lived her life stuck mostly in anger mode. It was hard on everybody when someone got stuck using just one emotion to meet all of life’s situations when there were dozens more appropriate to choose from, and countless combinations available.

The woman leaned against the hood of her tiny red car and motioned to Cowboy Johnson to fill her gas tank. He circled past her to the gas tank and began to fill it. She watched him, the gun lowered to her side. She stared at him. I could hear her thoughts. He was a man. And a man had inflicted this brutality on her. Her anger rose. The hand with the gun in it rose. She would definitely shoot him if I didn’t intervene.

My Sight kicked in. I grew angry. I wanted to run down the steps and do judo on her, kick her ass, though I didn’t know how. I wanted to kick the gun out of her hand with a hearty yell. Ha!

She looked up at me. I stared into her eyes and visualized her bruised face as having beautiful tattoos on it with landscapes filled with both Dark and Light. I reminded her soul that she had gone through countless rituals in her past lives in which she was gifted with the power those tattoos carried, that to understand this beat up meant that in this lifetime there was no access to the spiritual beautification rituals she needed. Instead, they had gathered force in her unconscious, and given to her in this uninformed, violent way.

Someone named Perry flashed into my mind. He was the only man she loved. Would ever love. Pity flashed through me and was gone instantly. I sent her a telepathic photo of him. He looked like Cowboy Johnson. Perry whoever he was, didn’t want the woman to hurt, or for her to hurt anyone else. Especially Cowboy Johnson, for some reason. Puzzled, I backed off and waited tensely while she took in that information. She was having a hard time with it, so I brought the water element in to dim down the fire. It didn’t work. It just made her madder. Steamed her up.

I tried to stay focused on her, but something more kept being shown to me. A stand of red cactus nearby. I didn’t know anything about a stand of red cactus. What did it mean? My Sight used a lot of symbols, and sometimes it was hard to tell what they meant. There was no time left to find out. I was to direct her to them. They liked and ate anger? Oh well. I caught a sudden glimpse of the red cactus. There were only a few, and they were weird looking. Flat and funny. Something was wrong with them.

The red cactus desert, I stated loudly into the thick, hot air. Cowboy Johnson gave an imperceptible nod. He didn’t realize he’d nodded, but for some reason, unless he agreed, the woman in red couldn’t be sent there.

I sent the woman a psychic message to hurry to the red cactus. She didn’t have good boundaries or defenses, which is how she got stuck in anger mode in the first place. She eased back into her car and sped off without noticing Cowboy Johnson again. He stood there with her gas cap in his hand. After a long minute, he turned and looked at me, his face pale, eyes silver-green chips of granite.

Wow! he breathed, pulling off his cap with the moose logo on it, wiping his face with the back of his hand. He weaved unsteadily toward the porch steps, made it up two of them, and sat down. I wobbled down the steps and thumped down beside of him. He watched the highway. I knew it was in case she came back.

You saved the day, kiddo. I would have been a goner without you.

I grabbed his arm in a death grip and gasped accusingly.

The exudations from that damned juniper tree.

I waved my other hand at the lone skinny branch sticking out just past the corner of the store.

…that thing stinks like a feral varmint in heat on a lonely back road after a deadly forest fire heated it and all its kin into defensive perspiration… just like Mrs. Barry’s back unwashed, unleashed, flea bitten dog back home! The damn tree is a pungent, pimply assed, pissy dimorphic juvenile among trees! My tone was scornful. He didn’t ask me who Mrs. Barry was.

That bitch! I shouted, and promptly threw up. He held me. When I was done, he stood and helped me up the steps, into the store, and into the back room where he planted me on the Hideous Green Sofa. Then he grabbed the rifle he kept propped against his weird looking dresser by the closet door. He hefted it and glanced at me.

Stay inside.

He meant it.

Just in case she comes back.

He left, locking the back door behind him. I listened to him lock the front door. Then there was only silence. I sat there, thinking about Cowboy Johnson. I had almost lost him this morning. It happened so fast. We can lose someone we love in an instant. Someone who is our foundation, our bedrock.

I remembered the first time I met him. He was no stranger to me—hadn’t been for many lifetimes. I was beyond thrilled to see him again. Maybe now somebody with some common sense would help me out. I circled him and sniffed his Goodness. My new daddy! He didn’t know it yet, but I planned to stick to him like glue, forever. Forever Velcro. Mama looked like she’d seen a ghost when she met him. But that was Mama. We both have the Sight. She’s the one who started calling him Cowboy Johnson. She seemed to think that was his real name. We started calling him Cowboy Johnson too because he liked it when Mama called him that. Maybe he kept secrets too like the rest of us; maybe he didn’t want his real name bandied about in case any robbers of spirits came around.

Maybe he talked about his secrets in that journal he wrote in every night. I often watched him and wondered. When he put on his thick-rimmed black glasses to go over the store’s receipts and bills, I knew he would write in the journal when he was done with them. It was the last thing he did every night. I yearned to ask him if there were more journals and could I read them, but I never dared.

Mama was in love with him and he was in love with her. She didn’t seem to notice that he loved her back. Mostly she was that way with me, too. When I was little, it used to bother me.

Mama read every book ever written on how to become enlightened, and she studied me speculatively when I was young. I read some of those books of hers to find out what she was up to and discovered that some of the holy men in those books sit perfectly still in one spot for maybe forty years and subsist on one bowl of rice per day. If a normal mother birthed a kid who chose that spiritual path, she would be devastated, not to mention bored to death by the little brat; but not Mama.

If she’d birthed a son instead of a daughter, he might have been in a predicament. What kind of conversation could a mother have with a kid like that? How was your rice today, son? How about a pot of flowers to liven up the place?

Anyway, that kind of life might be appropriate for many manly spiritual beings that never yearn to have babies or clean a kitchen, but it was not my cup of tea. I wanted to grow up and travel the world and see the pyramids and dance many dances and live near the ocean, which I have never seen. That was it for now. I knew I would change, it was only biological, and I could add more things to my to do list later.

The afternoon crawled by. Cowboy Johnson came and went in the store, carrying his gun, locking the door behind him each time. I was bored out of my terror into sheer boredom by three o’clock in the afternoon and started painting a lizard at my workstation in the store just outside of Cowboy Johnson’s living quarters.

Normaine and Mama came home from the ranch with the rest of the misfits at six, hungry for dinner and laughing. Neither of us said anything about the lady in red.

Come on. Let’s go for a short ride, he said to me. I nodded. I knew where we were headed. And it wasn’t into Pico Pistachio to get tacos, either. We were headed to Washman’s Draw. When we got there, we got out of Elsie, his El Camino, and looked around. There were fresh tire tracks and footprints in the sand. The woman in red came here, then left. Her tire tracks led back out to the highway, curving in the opposite direction from the store. We both gusted out sighs of relief. I started to follow her footprints over the ridge, but Cowboy Johnson called me back.

Later.

That was all he said. When we got back to the store, I watched him throw away the gas cap she’d left behind. Then he got back in Elsie and took off again. A little while later, he returned with William the Dude following him. They got out and walked off together, talking in low, secretive voices. Then William the Dude left in his gorgeous canary yellow pick up, which I had nicknamed Parry Y. Truck, Parry being short for Parrot, and Y for yellow.

In an hour or so, Cowboy Johnson went out to the campfire grounds behind the store and started the fire. It was too early, but no one seemed to notice. After the fire was going good, I sat down on a log and waited. The rest of the misfits straggled out and joined us. When everybody was accounted for, Cowboy Johnson spoke. He shoved his words out in a reluctant rush.

There is a hidden place just over the ridge at Washman’s Draw. I made it for William so he would have a place close by to drop off the anger and pain from his arthritis. And whatever else. That way, he could unload it and come back into the world quicker.

He shrugged.

It’s the only place I know of where the red cactus grow. There are just a few of them. Their skin is red. They are flat, wide, short and sturdy, with many long red bristles. They have two raised arms with knobby fists at their ends making make them look like they’re shaking their fists at something. They are hidden from the highway by the terrain on purpose. They are there to eat people’s anger. It is a delicious dessert to them, and a fine fertilizer. Their regular diet is the anger pouring out of the cars and big rigs whizzing by just over the ridge. That is their survival anger. But they like more. They are partial to shouted words and bullets for aeration or eradication purposes. Throwing stuff at them is beneficial too. Today, for the first time, I sent someone there besides William, with Geena’s prompting.

He kept drawing cactus shapes in the sand while everyone looked at me curiously. Then he said, Life hasn’t been a picnic for any of us. So next time you get a mad buildup, you might want to go feed it to the red cactus just over the ridge at Washman’s Draw.

Everyone looked at each other with puzzled looks on their faces. Then they started laughing.

You’re kidding, right? they chorused.

Cowboy Johnson didn’t crack a hint of a smile. He shook his head no.

Geena, you go first. You got the right. You earned it today. The rest of you just wait here a few minutes.

It was just a couple miles, but I was a runner, and proud of it. I jumped up and took off running. At last I raced over the ridge. I skidded to a stop and put my hands on my knees and panted while I looked the red cactus over. There were six of them. They stood a few feet apart in a long row, their bottoms buried in sand. They were faded red wood cutouts painted a fresh, fire engine red once upon a time. I started laughing. They looked ridiculous! Each one was stuck in a metal milk can filled with sand and propped upright with two-by-fours. I made out the faded outlines of angry faces painted on them. Their fists were doubled up, punching air. They were riddled with bullet holes. Ridiculous!

Then I stopped laughing. The air here was charged with something. An indestructible, tough smell of robust dill mixed with the sweaty strength of wily road warriors mixed with mummified roadkill and steaming asphalt, rose up around the red cactus in pure, practically holistic, badass vapors. Bad ass courage and kick ass goodness slid through the air and surrounded me. I breathed it in, straightened up and planted my feet wide apart. So, William the Dude comes here to ease his hurt and pain and frustration? Had he shot the bullet holes in the red cactus?

I cocked my head and looked at them, remembering the final road trip Mama and I took to get away from up north. It seemed so long ago. In this place, I somehow knew the memories of the years before the trip were manageable. We’d traveled south down dirt roads that sometimes narrowed down into lanes almost choked to death by weeds in places; places where Mama stopped and backed up and got us out of there. She always said we weren’t ready to stop when we just got started. There was no going back. The little, winding road leading to Washman’s Draw was kind of like that. You’d never notice it unless you knew it was there. But it was clean and clear and led here.

Maybe I could tell the red cactus desert about the so called dad I left back in Ardenville. I just might do that sometime. That way, Mama would never know because I knew she would never come here.

hapter Two

Ah’ runs down ‘round da’ corner,

my beads clankin’ in the night air,

dere’s shaderr’s sneakin’ round, oh yeah,

til’ dey’ hear the sound of prayer

and my skinny ankles clickin’ an’ a’ movin’ on.

Mama told me stories about the Elementals when I was a little girl. One story was about how birds behaved in this world. I never heard that story again. I think she made it up because flight was a large part of her nature. She said that once upon a time, all little girls possessed the souls of birds. The proud girls were like blue jays. They wore showy plumage and gossiped and liked to be mean and didn’t like thinkers and took over all the bird feeders.

Then there were girls like robins. They got up early because they were day birds. Early birds. They worked hard during the day and wore red vests to show their industrious nature, stayed sober, didn’t understand cleverness or jokes, held solemn gentleness in their souls, sang in church lofts, and wished everyone well.

The little brown sparrows acted and looked like humble little birds when they were alone. But get them together in flocks, and they could tear loose the strongest and biggest of bad, unseen entities that got a hold of people’s souls. They could grab and tear away the bad things dwelling in scary places and inside of people and carry them away. The sparrows knew how to use their sharp little beaks and shrieks when the time came right for action. They had the power and sound group Sight carries when it stands together to protect Goodness. They banded together when their own personal world was too small for them to accomplish a necessary powerful act of Sight alone. They acted in community for their spiritual purposes but nested modestly and calmly by themselves otherwise.

Mama said owls were night birds. They were wise with the wisdom the Moon gifted to women. Owls knew how to soar noiselessly in the night, learning things day sounds would have prevented. Owls soared in the night, like eagles soared in the day. Owls and eagles never got personally involved, although they needed each other to open up the days and nights in this world. Owls were the teachers of flying through night skies far up into the heavens where the stars and Moon and planets waited in eternal silence for visitors. They were silent escorts of night flights into dream worlds and the places where unborn hopes lived.

I asked Mama about eagles, but she said